1 Then the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen down to the earth from heaven.+ He+ was given the key to the shaft leading down to the Abyss.+ 2 When he opened the cover+ of the shaft to the Abyss, so much smoke came pouring out of it+—thick and billowing smoke, like that from a large furnace—+that it blocked the sun’s light and made the sky dark.+ 3 And from out of the smoke swarms of locusts descended upon the land.+ They were given a scorpion-like ability to inflict painful wounds,+ 4 and were ordered to inflict harm not on any of the vegetation+ or plants or trees, but specifically on those people who did not have the mark from God’s signet on their foreheads. 5 The locusts+ were not allowed to kill these people,+ but only to inflict them with tormenting pain for five months; the pain they inflicted was like that inflicted by a scorpion when it stings someone. 6 During those five months,+ people will want to die but will not be able to;+ they will long for death, but it will elude them. 7 The locusts looked like horses prepared for battle. On their heads they wore what looked like victor’s crowns of gold, and their faces looked like human faces. 8 Their hair was like women’s hair, and their teeth were like the teeth of a lion.+ 9 Their chests were covered with what looked like iron breastplates, and the sound made by their whirring wings resembled the rumbling and rattling of many horse-drawn chariots charging into battle.+ 10 Their tails were like the tails of scorpions, with stingers at the end,+ and in their tails was their ability+ to inflict people with pain for five months. 11 They had a king ruling over them, the angel in charge of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is “Abaddon,” and in Greek, “Apollyon”—the “Destroyer.”+

12 Come and gone is the first woe. Take note: Two more are still to come.+

13 Then the sixth angel blew his trumpet, and I heard a voice speaking from the horn-shaped corners of the gold altar in front of God. 14 The voice said to the sixth angel, the one holding the trumpet, “Release the four angels who are bound at the great river Euphrates.”+ 15 At that, the four angels, who had been prepared for this hour and day and month and year, were released to kill a third of mankind. 16 The number of soldiers mounted on horseback was two hundred million; I heard how many there were.+ 17 And this is what the horses and their riders looked like in the vision:+ On their chests they wore breastplates that were fiery red and hyacinth blue and sulfur yellow. The heads of the horses resembled the heads of lions, and out of their mouths came fire and smoke and sulfur. 18 By these three plagues a third of mankind was killed—by the fire and the smoke and the sulfur that were coming from the horses’+ mouths. 19 The horses’ deadly power was in their mouths, you see, and also in their tails. Their tails, you see, had the heads of snakes at the end of them,+ and with them they inflict harm.

20 As for the rest of mankind, those who survived+ these plagues, they still refused to repent and turn away from the false images they had made+; they did not stop worshiping demons and idols made of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood—things that can’t even see or hear or walk. 21 And they refused to repent of their murders, their acts of witchcraft, their sexual immorality, or their stealing.+